Redesign

It's all crossovers these days. From the polo grounds of Malibu to the campgrounds of Maine, nearly a fifth of all vehicles sold in the U.S. last year resided somewhere in this netherworld between a car and an SUV. So the stakes were high for Toyota's overdue redesign of the RAV4, a pioneer of the segment in the mid-1990s that had grown stale in comparison with competitors. Often resembling small sport utility vehicles, crossovers are truck-like vehicles built on front-drive car platforms.

Facebook is releasing an update to its iPhone and iPad apps Tuesday that will include many of the new features it has promised over the last several months. The social network said the apps will now feature the redesigned News Feed it announced in March. Facebook says the change will be most notable in its iPad app; the new design will emphasize photos more than it has in the past. The app update also adds a new feature called "Chat Heads" that Facebook introduced earlier this month when it announced Facebook Home, its new interface for Android smartphones.

Facebook is testing a redesign of its Timeline feature that could make reading old posts slightly easier. The Menlo Park-based company confirmed that it is testing an experimental version of the redesign on a small number of users. The experimental design was discovered by Inside Facebook . It is similar to older designs Facebook used when its members had "Walls," in which status updates showed up in a linear fashion rather than zigzaging from left to right as they do now with the Timeline.

Google's digital store for Android smartphone users is getting a face-lift. Google announced Tuesday that it has begun to roll out a new look for the mobile version of Google Play, its rival to Apple's iTunes. Some users around the world will see the new design starting Tuesday, then over time, more and more users will see the redesign on their devices. Currently, the mobile store is text heavy, but the redesign will change that and instead emphasize the use of large images. QUIZ: How much do you know about Google?

The newspaper that introduced the world to the infographic is getting a makeover. Thirty years after the launch of the new national newspaper, USA Today unveiled a new logo, a more colorful look and bulked-up coverage of technology and travel. It also unveiled a digital redesign that gives the news operation a consistent look on its relaunched website and on mobile devices. “We're trying to reinvent news here,” said Larry Kramer, who took over in May as president and publisher of USA Today.

LOS ANGELES, CA, August 13, 2009 -- The Los Angeles Times today revealed a site redesign aimed at capitalizing on unparalleled online growth and emblematic of ongoing editorial and business strategy implementation which made latimes.com the fastest-growing top newspaper site June 2008-June 2009. "The new latimes.com is representative of the changes we've made to create an around-the-clock, integrated newsroom armed with the tools that ensure immediacy, feed the Web, mobile devices and social media, and supplements our print edition," said Times Editor Russ Stanton.

Google's digital store for Android smartphone users is getting a face-lift. Google announced Tuesday that it has begun to roll out a new look for the mobile version of Google Play, its rival to Apple's iTunes. Some users around the world will see the new design starting Tuesday, then over time, more and more users will see the redesign on their devices. Currently, the mobile store is text heavy, but the redesign will change that and instead emphasize the use of large images. QUIZ: How much do you know about Google?

Netflix is testing a redesign of its website that would for the first time separate movies and television shows into separate tabs, each with dozens of subcategories to help users sort through their thousands of options. The potential redesign is currently being tested with a small number of users. If the video subscription company finds that the design increases overall usage, it could deploy the new look to all 23.4 million of its Internet streaming customers in the U.S. Currently, users can find movies and television shows to watch on Netflix's website by searching or via suggestions the company makes based on content the user previously watched.

Google is beginning to roll out a redesign of YouTube that makes the video site look a lot more like Google+. The redesign is available only to a very small pool of people right now taking part in tests being conducted by the company. A screenshot of the redesign shows YouTube adapting Google+'s style. The black side bar has been ditched for a whiter, simpler lay out. At the same time, the middle feed appears to be wider and include larger video thumbnails. The right sidebar for recommended videos also looks different and now features a video in larger size at the top. All in all it looks like a cleaner feel, and it follows Google's redesign of Google+, which happened in April.

Twitter Inc. has redesigned its website for the first time in its four-year history to draw more users and get them to stay longer as it competes for advertising dollars with Internet rivals Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. The redesign, which will roll out to the website's 160 million users over the next several weeks, is intended to make the site easier and faster to use and to serve up more relevant content to users, executives said at a news...

Parents aren't supposed to pick favorites, but it's clear Hyundai has a soft spot for its Santa Fe. To hear the Korean automaker tell it, the crossover played a key role in Hyundai's transformation from maker of meek little econoboxes with shoddy reliability to a brand that rivals the best from Honda and Toyota. The third generation of the Santa Fe, rolling into dealerships now, demonstrates how far the company has come. This handsomely redesigned crossover is packed with utility and comes in two sizes: a five-passenger version and a seven-passenger model.

Pinterest will roll out a new look it has been testing since January to the rest of its users starting Monday. The popular social network said in a blog post that users can expect an invitation in their email to check out the redesign. Among the changes coming in the redesign are bigger pins with more information. Pinterest said that when users click on a pin, they'll also be able to navigate to see other pins from the same pinboard, other pins from the same source and other pins by people who pinned the item users are looking at. PHOTOS: Tech we want to see in 2013 Under the hood, Pinterest said it has rebuilt its foundation, which will make the website more reliable and make it easier for the company to improve it in the future.

MENLO PARK, Calif. - For some users, Facebook's front page used to grab their attention with the latest news from friends but had become a jumbled morass of random updates and photos. Their attention had increasingly begun to wander to shiny new offerings from Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat. Now Facebook is hoping to get people to stick around with a sweeping face lift to its most popular feature: News Feed, the steady stream of updates that users see when they log on to the social network.

Facebook revealed its redesigned News Feed and said the new feature will begin rolling out to users Thursday. The redesign emphasizes visual content and will be more in tune with the news feed of the Facebook mobile app. Facebook also said users can use a new switch  at the top right of the screen to toggle among different types of feeds to see different types of content. Among the feeds users will be able to switch among include close friends, games, all friends feed, most recent feed, music feed and following feed.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Facebook is rolling out a radical new redesign of News Feed, the biggest since it launched the feature in 2006. The giant social network plans to unveil the redesign at a press conference Thursday at its Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters. The redesign will reportedly give users new ways to catch up with what friends are doing, such as sorting through photos they share or music they are listening to. Right now users can only sort the News Feed by "Top Stories" or "Most Recent.

In the biggest sign so far that this is now Marissa Mayer's Yahoo, the Web company began rolling out a major redesign Wednesday morning to U.S. users. Yahoo.com users will be greeted by a new news-feed feature that allows them to scroll down continually for more news articles that have been gathered based off their interests and preferences. Users can also log into Yahoo using their Facebook account to gain a more personal experience. Besides the news feed, Yahoo also said it has newly designed homepage applications.

Stung by criticism from consumers, its own dealers and auto reviewers, Honda Motor Co. is about to begin selling a significantly redesigned Civic. The changes come after only a year of the current-generation model. Automakers rarely rush to remake a vehicle so new to the market. Honda is making changes to the sheet metal on the vehicle to give it a more aggressive, sportier look. Inside, it is improving comfort, changing the much-criticized interior and is revamping the sedan's driving characteristics.

The city of Los Angeles now has a newly redesigned website and, coming next month, a mobile app. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced the new tech tools during his first Google+ Hangout news conference Wednesday afternoon. (Check out a replay here .) Speaking from Google's offices in Venice, Villaraigosa conceded that the moves were overdue. He said that the tech scene in L.A. has grown rapidly in recent years and the city wanted a website and app to match that momentum.

Google has redesigned the way it displays image search results, making them faster and easier for users to see. The company announced the redesign this week. Users will start to see the new look in the next few days. Under the new format, when a user chooses a picture from the search results, rather than displaying a new page with a preview of the image, Google will instead pull up a larger version of the picture along with its data underneath the thumbnail when a user scrolls the cursor over it. Users will also be able to use keyboard commands to flip through images.